Tuesday, September 22, 2009

...that has consumed my life for the last two weeks. I've finally just wrapped up working around 15 hours for my "Accounting Information Systems" class. Woot. I'm so bleary right now.

Apparently AIS is the "scary" class in the accounting concentration. There's definitely been a lot of homework (which I think has helped weed out a lot of people), but I would honestly say that there's a lot of value in all the homework. As an accountant, or auditor, you really need to know how your systems work, where there's potential for fraud or where controls might fail. Yeah, I probably sound like your typical book devouring nerd right now. =P

School's been in session for roughly three weeks now, and I've gotten a much better handle on my classes. For those of you who enter the comm school, I highly recommend "Negotiations" with Professor Bass. He's an excellent professor with lots of experience, and we've been learning in the best way through doing actual negotiations. I'm slightly sad though, yesterday was the first time in which I didn't have a successful negotiation. I was an employer, and my partner was a student I'd just extended an offer to. We didn't come to an agreement because she wanted a much higher salary than I was willing to offer, and I realized through the course of our negotiations that she seemed to be in it for the short term, while I was looking to build a long term team. This incompatibility in goals really spurred my decision to not keep pursuing this deal. Hopefully the professor sees it that way too tomorrow, *shrug.

I also recommend Professor Porter's "Federal Taxation I" class. While it might seem like the boringest subject on earth and that you'd rather gouge your own eyeballs out before learning about tax, the professor actually makes it a really interesting subject. Her lecture outlines explain difficult concepts very clearly, and her method of teaching somehow manages to capture the class' interest.

I also had my first interview on, incidentally, the first day that interviews started. Kicking off this recruitment season was probably the hardest interview I had in my life. A lot of it had to do with my atypical background, and I definitely got drilled on some technical questions (and this was the interviewer being nice to me!). However, I have to say that it's been my most enjoyable one thus far, precisely because it was so challenging. I appreciated the questions and hope I rose to the occasion.

Morale of that story is, don't be in a hurry to pigeon hole yourself into a future career path when you come into college. My resume was probably one of the last things the interviewer expected to see, and yet I still received an interview offer. Things change, your interests change, and you end up finding out that your personality is actually better suited elsewhere. The world is your oyster, embrace it. =)